Coleridge draws fire over book review

Published: 19 March 2007

The Australian
has apologised over a book review by Canberra Archbishop Mark Coleridge
that the newspaper said contained similar content to a review by
another author published earlier in a British publication.

The Tablet reports that The Australian published the following brief notice on 27 February: "On Saturday February 24, The Weekend Australian published a review by Archbishop Mark Coleridge of Richard Dawkins' book The God Delusion.

"It
has since been discovered that the archbishop's review contained some
similar content to a review of Dawkins' book by Terry Eagleton
published in The London Review of Books in October. The Australian regrets that this occurred."

Archbishop
Coleridge, who worked in the Vatican's Secretariat of State and was an
auxiliary bishop of Melbourne before becoming Archbishop of Canberra
and Goulburn last year, was unavailable for comment, the Tablet says.

The story has also been picked up in the blogosphere with Catholic World News blogger, Diogenes, describing the similarities as "culpable pilferage".

Diogenes
says the most "obvious explanations" are that either Archbishop
Coleridge plagiarised or that he "farmed out the job to some understudy
who plagiarised".

"The latter explanation doesn't add lustre to
the archbishop's reputation as a man of letters, but it may fall within
the permissible range of 'official' authorship generally understood to
be staff-written - in roughly the same category as the op-eds that
senators publish in the New York Times," the blogger writes, calling on the Archbishop to make himself available for comment.

According to an Age
column earlier this month, a reader first challenged the archbishop's
review soon after it appeared. In the review, Archbishop Coleridge
quoted Mr Eagleton by name but the challenge is about further material
that had no attribution.